John Huston directed and Humphrey Bogart starred in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Warner Bros. Studio head Jack Warner heralded the critical and box-office success as “the greatest film we have ever made.”Footnote 1
Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images.
The Hollywood classic depicts the travails of three down-and-out Americans who join forces to seek treasure in Mexico's Sierra Madre mountain range. Striking it rich, the men grow increasingly avaricious and plagued with suspicion.
The temptation is greatest for Bogart's opportunistic drifter, Fred C. Dobbs, whose descent into greed accompanies a descent into madness, leading him to betray his partners before meeting an untimely death at the hands of unscrupulous Mexican bandits. All the gold dust they accumulated, meanwhile, disappears in a gale of wind.
Movie poster image, Art/Getty Images.
Much has been said of the film's seemingly universal parable of “gold lust,” a story as timeless as original sin. Embedded within the film, however, is a little-recognized but vibrant critique of American power and capitalist exploitation in twentieth-century Mexico. This analysis lies below the surface, buried in the subtext of the film's onscreen action and hidden beneath layers of its production and censorship.
“Hey mister, can you stake a fellow American to a meal?” In the early minutes of the film, Dobbs, an out-of-work American (Bogart) passes through the bustling markets of the northeastern port city of Tampico and solicits money from another American in a pristine white business suit (played by the movie's director, John Huston). The slick capitalist begrudgingly offers a coin, and the fleeting scene establishes the lowly state of Bogart's character before his gold hunting venture.
Yet more is at stake in this encounter than what first appears. The time and location are crucial. In the 1910s and 1920s, when the film's action takes place, Tampico hosted the historic Mexican oil boom.Footnote 2 The convergence of American laborers and investors on the area's oil fields drives the plot.
John Huston Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library.
During the film's development stage, Huston undertook extensive research into the oil industry and the recent booms in Texas, Oklahoma, and Tampico. Warner Bros. records reveal a considerable effort to understand the look and feel of the work camps and derricks from the perspective of the average laborer.Footnote 3 Drawing on the history of several unscrupulous wildcatters, Huston's portrayal of American oil men in Mexico would be far from flattering in the film's opening scenes.
Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images.
In Huston's onscreen Tampico, Dobbs encounters systematic corruption in the foreign-run oil industry just as it was entering into a crushing bust cycle and operators were moving on to new prospects in the fields of Venezuela. He secures temporary and back-breaking employment on an oil rig with a fellow penniless American, Bob Curtin (played by Tim Holt, left). But a duplicitous American foreman (Barton MacLane, right) fleeces the pair of their earnings.
John Huston Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library.
An even sharper scene never made it onto the screen. In early versions of the screenplay, written by Huston, the film opened in the city bank of Tampico in the midst of a “hot dispute” between an American diplomat, an American capitalist, and a Mexican government official. In this version, the Americans refused to pay taxes to Mexico. Huston's treatment observed that “the justice” of the taxation was apparent, but nevertheless the Americans would not budge with the new Mexican government, which they belittled as mere “bandits.” Huston imagined the Mexican official retorting that the United States itself was “to a certain extent” responsible for the chaos in Mexico. Would it be so, he asked, “if her Big Brother to the North had not exploited Mexico for all she was worth?”Footnote 4
Tampico Plaza circa 1880. Library of Congress.
Huston next envisioned that Mexicans would threaten to expropriate Americans’ oil installations, as Mexico famously did in 1938, fifteen years after the action of the plot but ten years before the film's production. The Americans in the scene would retaliate with their own threat—that the United States “would go to any length to uphold and defend its vested rights,” including a declaration of war. But another imagined reply would provide damning commentary on such a move: “Mexico would not be much worse off” than it already was; “Bullets are more merciful than death by hunger.” At the scene's end, the director planned for the camera to pull back out of the window and crane down to show Dobbs panhandling to the Americans going in and out of the bank, presumably on course to meet the man in white.Footnote 5
Warner Brothers/Getty Images.
Yet the bank scene was cut, and a different opening introduces the panhandling Dobbs. At a board announcing the lotería winners, Dobbs tears up a losing ticket before begging a peso off the businessman. Ambling to a café, he spends the coin and swats away a Mexican youth (played by an adolescent Robert Blake) who eventually entices him to purchase what will prove a fateful lottery ticket. The humble earnings from this winner will eventually fund a gold mining venture. The more heavy-handed commentary on American strong-arm tactics in Mexico fell to the cutting room floor.
John Huston on set. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
Understanding the film's critique of the American oil industry in Mexico requires close attention to Huston, its screenwriter and director. He had become the golden boy of cinematic realism with his directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon (1941). But his political interests extended beyond the world depicted in that San Francisco detective film noir. Huston counted himself among the artist-activists of the “cultural front,” supporting the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War and other international leftist causes. Mexico also fascinated him. He had lived there as a young man in the mid-1920s, and even claimed in his autobiography to have been commissioned as an honorary cavalry rider in the post-revolutionary Mexican army.Footnote 6
U.S. campaign against Villa, 1916. Library of Congress.
However, while Huston and many other Americans converged on Mexico during and after the revolution out of a twin sense of adventure and political activism, U.S. military personnel had also arrived to help protect Americans’ economic ventures south of the border. Against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, which broke out in 1910, the Woodrow Wilson administration had invaded Veracruz in 1914—on grounds of military necessity, but subsequently used diplomacy to defend the nearby oil industry in Tampico. General John J. Pershing's American Punitive Expedition similarly crossed the border in 1916 to chastise Pancho Villa, whose raids had targeted the mining regions of Sonora and Chihuahua, where Villa caused major disruptions but also cut deals (in the hope of securing arms) for some U.S. mining interests. Pershing's intervention infuriated both Villa and the nation's revolutionary leader, Venustiano Carranza, on grounds that it extended U.S. sovereignty. Villa ultimately issued a nationalist appeal in the form of a call to end foreign land ownership in the region, helping to force Pershing's retreat nearly one decade before Huston arrived on the scene.Footnote 7
B. Traven via Getty Images.
Huston's time in Mexico sparked his interest in a novel set there, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927), written by a famously secretive and enigmatic figure known as B. Traven. Born in Germany as Otto Wienecke (according to the best accounts available), Traven took on a series of pseudonyms as he traveled as an essayist and actor, and eventually settled in Mexico in 1924. When Huston corresponded with Traven about adapting the film, they bonded over a shared acknowledgment that Mexico's poverty and lawlessness had been exacerbated by the long history of outsiders exploiting its minerals. Traven praised Huston for not “sugar-coating” the story or losing sight of the fact that in this economic system, “only what is in your tummy and what is in your brain is really yours.” However, Traven also reserved most of his sympathy for white laborers and only some Mexicans, especially Indigenous Mexicans, viewing those driven to crime and banditry, for example, as the dirtiest and lousiest “scum.”Footnote 8
From left: Tim Holt, John Huston, unnamed man, and Humphrey Bogart. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images.
After acquiring the rights to the novel in the mid-1940s, Huston completed the shooting script for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in January 1947, just in time for production in early spring in Mexico—one of the first Warner Bros. features filmed extensively in a foreign location—from San José Purua to Tampico. When Tampico newspaper editors, upon failing to get the customary bribe, or mordida (“bite”), began accusing the filmmakers of representing Mexico in a derogatory light, some locals hassled the production crew. Huston's friends, including the famed muralist Diego Rivera, interceded on the filmmaker's behalf with President Miguel Alemán Valdés, who agreed to provide a government representative to ensure smooth filming.Footnote 9
“Gold's a devilish sort of thing.” The film's main action begins following the row between the oil foreman and Dobbs and Curtin, as they encounter the effervescent prospector Howard, played to perfect pitch by Huston's father, Walter. At a Tampico boarding house, the old man holds forth: “Not even the threat of miserable death would keep you from trying to get 10,000 more,” then 25,000, 50,000, and 100,000 dollars-worth of gold. Prospecting was as addictive as roulette. Dobbs insists that it would not happen to him. The scene establishes Howard as the sage and Dobbs as the fool. Yet a partnership is struck, buoyed by the news of Dobbs’ lottery earnings. The three form a joint-venture in gold hunting.
Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
As the trio navigate the mountainous terrain just beyond the inland mining town of Durango, Chihuahua, Howard provides tutorials on the ins and outs of mining: how to survey for gold sands (he laughs when the novices grow excited over pyrite, or “fool's gold”); how to locate—against the considerable odds—an incredibly lucrative vein; and how to mine, sluice, and pan for gold. Equally important, the old-timer instructs the amateurs in the importance of concealing their findings from outsiders in order to prevent any interference in staking a mine claim.
John Huston Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library.
Huston had conducted painstaking research not only into the oil industry but also into the process that allowed Americans to enter mining claims in Mexico. Putting the Warner Bros. research department to work, he asked, were there “specific boundaries to American mining claims in Mexico in the period after the last war or did they have the right to mine the entire area?” The research team responded with accounts of mining laws from the Mexican Constitution of 1917, detailing the procedures by which foreigners, like locals, could explore and develop land claims, known as pertencias.Footnote 10
Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
This research inflects the action onscreen as Howard guides his apprentice miners in unearthing the so-called treasures of the Sierra Madre. They amass a great fortune in gold sand, but their celebration is cut short by the onset of paranoia over subterfuge within the group, as well as the arrival of threats to their ownership in the form of competing interests and sovereignties in Mexico.
Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images.
The first perceived threat arrives in the form of yet another American, James Cody, who stumbles on the group's enterprise. Played by Bruce Bennett (right), the part had initially been offered to then-Western player and future-politician Ronald Reagan.Footnote 11
Yet the greatest danger to the trio's property in Mexico turns out to be a group of bandits, falsely claiming to be federales, members of Mexico's notorious federal constabulary. Dobbs asks them to show their badges. Gold Hat, an unnamed bandit with a gilded sombrero and played with menacing humor by Alfonso Bedoya, splutters the most famous and misquoted line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Badges? We got no badges. We don't need badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!” Although they lack formal authority, the brigands embody another sovereign power—one conferred by the gun.
Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images.
Although Dobbs, Curtin, and Howard escape the scrape with the bandits, thanks to the timely arrival of the real federales in pursuit of the notorious outlaws, their problems are far from over. Cody, whom the trio had resolved to murder rather than bring into their profit-making enterprise, dies in the altercation with the bandits. After paying respects to Cody, their erstwhile antagonist and fallen countryman, Howard is enlisted to assist the Indigenous peoples of the area. During the journey down the mountain, the paranoid and distrustful Dobbs shoots and leaves Curtin for dead, taking his share of the gold as well as Howard's.
Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images.
The next morning, as the town of Durango looms in sight, the ragged Dobbs once again encounters the Mexican bandits. He puts up a foolhardy fight to protect his treasure, and in crushing finality, Gold Hat bludgeons Dobbs with a machete—an unsavory end for the once self-assured American. The lesson seems clear: one man's lust for gold led to his moral dissolution and eventual undoing.
John Huston Papers, courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library.
Joseph Breen. Getty Images
But once again, there is more than meets the eye to this gold fable. Huston initially intended to surround the film's climax with exposition that would have made clear the geopolitical and historical conditions that led to Dobbs's comeuppance. In an earlier version of the script, the director had planned for Howard to express surprising empathy for the bandits and, by extension, Mexico. The elder prospector, Huston imagined, would admonish Dobbs for complaining that the bandits would show them no “mercy,” rejoining, “Do you know why? Because nobody has ever shown them any…. I can even see a kind of justice in what's going to happen to us. We're as much thieves as they are.” Huston envisioned Howard citing as evidence the looting of mountains for gold, copper, silver, and oil by foreign companies, taking what belonged to the people of Mexico.Footnote 12
Warner Bros. executive Jack Warner, center. Getty Images.
Why had Huston removed Howard's moralizing speech, along with the scene in the bank? The director jotted instructions for himself to “clean up Howard's speech about U.S. injustice shown Mexico,” but did not explain his motivation.Footnote 13 Perhaps Joseph Breen, the powerful head of the Production Code Administration, insisted on the cuts. However, Breen's concerns did not seem to be about the film's depiction of systematic exploitation. Instead, in copious suggested revisions, Hollywood's toughest censor requested the removal of the expletives “helluva,” “dammit,” and “raise hell,” as well as portrayals of prostitutes and people walking around barefoot.Footnote 14
Works Progress Administration poster. Library of Congress.
Or maybe the studio itself had forced Huston to alter aspects of the film. He later claimed as much to Lillian Ross of the New Yorker, recounting that the company, run by Jack Warner (center), asked him to remove a title card from the opening and closing sequences that read: Gold is worth what it is because of the labor that went into the finding and the getting of it. Huston noted that “labor” was apparently a “dangerous” word in print, so instead he only used the line in spoken dialogue.Footnote 15
John Huston and father, Walter Huston. Getty Images.
Warner Bros. studio producers also worried about the film's setting and story “in relation to the ‘Good Neighbor’ policy.”Footnote 16 Cultural diplomacy had become an important element of the campaign to promote more collegial relations in the Western Hemisphere since President Franklin D. Roosevelt had initiated the policy in 1933. The government had enlisted Hollywood heavyweights, from Walt Disney to Orson Welles, to filmmaking projects that sought to dramatize positive relations between the United States and Latin America.Footnote 17 Even Breen's reservations about the portrayal of squalor stemmed from concern about the “feelings of foreign nations.”Footnote 18
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, center, John Huston, behind, in defense of the Hollywood Ten. Getty Images.
Then again, Huston (left) may have simply cut the scenes and speeches purely on artistic grounds, believing that they slowed the film's pace. The desire for dramatic unity may have trumped his desire to shine a spotlight on American policies and interests in Mexico. At the 1949 Academy Awards, he won Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Ronald Reagan, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall on stage with Harry Truman in Los Angeles. Rene Lausen, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Only months after production on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre wrapped, Huston helped to form the Committee for the First Amendment, enlisting Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall, among others, to fly to Washington, DC, in October 1947 to protest hearings of the newly resuscitated House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). None of the film's personnel became specific targets of HUAC's brewing anti-communist crusade, but the congressional committee had denounced a left-leaning group of film industry writers and actors, dubbed the “Hollywood Ten,” as “subversives.”Footnote 19 But when the Committee for the First Amendment's appearance in DC drew a blaze of bad publicity, Bogart disavowed his activism in an article, “I'm No Communist.”Footnote 20
Log for Presidential trip to Puerto Rico. Courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Bogart, chastened by the backlash for his defense of the Hollywood Ten, became an inoffensively moderate campaigner for President Harry S. Truman in his bid for re-election. In September 1948, he joined Lauren Bacall and Ronald Reagan, his almost-costar in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, under a canopy of flags behind Truman as the president addressed an audience at Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles.Footnote 21
Truman, meanwhile, supported the projection of U.S. power in Latin America and beyond. In an era when critics of the New Deal chipped away at its provisions, the Truman administration collaborated with private industrialists, shaping overseas development programs in ways that created conditions favorable to American investment, including extractive enterprises.Footnote 22 During a presidential tour around the Caribbean to promote such policies, which included stopovers in Puerto Rico and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the staff on board the USS Williamsburg screened The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the president's mess. But Truman retired to his cabin before the camera flickered.Footnote 23
Even if Truman had stayed up to watch it, much of the compelling depiction of rapacious U.S. power south of the border in Huston's masterpiece had already been submerged as subtext. It takes digging beneath the film's surface to uncover one of the most widely consumed, if imperfectly and partially absorbed, critiques of U.S. relations with Mexico in the twentieth century.
